It's 'Insane' Chicago Isn't The Sweet Home Of A Blues Museum

CLARKSDALE, MS — Driving south on Blues Highway from Memphis, it's difficult not to remember that the miles of cotton fields once were harvested by enslaved people and their descendants, many who made the Great Migration to Chicago.

In 1943, the King of Chicago Blues — the late McKinley Morganfield, better known as "Muddy Waters" — made that trek north from the Mississippi Delta.

He got a job at a Chicago paper mill, bought his first electric guitar, plugged it into an amplifier and, you know, changed popular music forever.

On a recent afternoon, I stopped to read the sign marking where Waters lived in a wooden shack on the Stovall Plantation outside Clarksdale that was his primary residence until he moved to Chicago. I thought about the battle to designate Waters' home in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood as a historic landmark. And how little effort beyond an annual music festival that Chicago leaders have made to keep the history of the blues alive in our town.

At that moment, it struck me that former Mayor Rahm Emanuel actually wanted Chicago taxpayers to foot the bill and give up lakefront land for a museum dedicated to "Star Wars" filmmaker George Lucas' curation of "narrative arts."

And to think, our town isn’t the sweet home of a museum preserving the legacy of Chicago Blues.

While visiting Clarksdale, locals told me I'm not alone in my befuddlement over the brazen lack of respect for the electrified version of Delta Blues birthed in Chicago on Muddy Waters' guitar — and ripped off by Led Zeppelin and borrowed by the Rolling Stones and too many other rocker bands to count.

"The thing about Chicago, it's insane to me .... Yeah, we had the first blues museum in the world in Clarksdale. That makes sense. But the second one should have been in Chicago, 'cause that's where all the musicians from here went," said Roger Stolle, a blues-loving promoter, tourism guru, author, producer and owner of the Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art shop in Clarksdale, where I found him.

"The first place of significance up there is so underpromoted it's ridiculous, the Blues Heaven Foundation at 2120 S. Michigan Avenue, the Chess Records building where all that music was recorded," Stolle said. "It's the most important thing musically in Chicago. It should be like Sun Studios [where Elvis recorded in Memphis] they pack 'em in there, it's a great tour. Chess Records should be just like that. Every blues artist recorded there in the '50s and '60s. But it's not. Crazy, just crazy."

Like the estates of lesser blues legends, the house where Waters wrote hit songs including "Hoochie Coochie Man" and “Mannish Boy" crumbled due to neglect.

Waters moved to suburban Westmont in 1983. The Kenwood house was passed on to family members, including his great-great-granddaughter Chandra Cooper of Milwaukee, who defaulted on a $311,250 mortgage in 2012.

It took years, a good amount of bullying — and, most recently, a $50,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation — to convince Chicago decision-makers to designate as a city landmark Waters' first home at 4339 S. Lake Park Drive in Kenwood, which had gone into foreclosure and onto the city's demolition list, marked with a red "X" as a structure not worth saving.

Now, Cooper — Waters' great-great-granddaughter — is raising cash with plans to turn the house into a MOJO [Muddy Waters Official Jam Outfit] Museum with an educational studio in the basement where Waters jammed with his legendary contemporaries including Chuck Berry, Otis Span and Howlin' Wolf.

Still, a museum honoring Muddy Waters could be a long way off.

When it comes to the blues, there never seems to be a rush to preserve the genre's history.

In 1979, the Delta Blues Museum started as a bunch of artifacts laid out in a school for a group of tourists who were coming through town. The museum moved to a public library and, eventually, the renovated train depot where it is today.

The plantation cabin where Waters lived was dismantled and taken on the road as a traveling museum of sorts before being deemed a blues artifact worthy of permanent home.

In the '80s, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top made a guitar from one of the boards from the shack — "Muddywood," he called it — and sold it in an auction to benefit the Delta Blues Museum.

In 1996, the shack made a stop at Blues Fest in Grant Park in Chicago.

Chicago bluesman Wayne Baker Brooks said the circus-like display made him so angry, it inspired him to write a book, "Blues For Dummies."

"I remember standing inside there, where Muddy Waters lived with 16 other people, that it dawned on me: They uprooted this great man's house. People make pilgrimages to [Elvis'] Graceland," he said. "They'd never uproot part of Graceland. All our history, the roots of all American music — and Elvis stole that music — and they uprooted Muddy Waters' house. The blues don't get no respect, man."

Saving Muddy Waters' house in Kenwood, well, it's a start, Brooks told me when we chatted on the phone after my visit to Clarksdale.

"I truly love the idea of a museum there, man. Muddy changed music. When he plugged into a guitar amp, it turned into rock 'n' roll, and he has to be recognized by his own city," he said. "There's no way there should have ever had a red "X" on Muddy Waters' house in the first place."

But is a neighborhood museum on a residential street good enough? I asked.

"Aw, hell naw," Brooks said.

That's what folks said down at the Devil's Crossroads, too.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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